Steinbeck Quotes

“If you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.
[…]
If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”
― John Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

“Many are the stories I have heard about myself. I have mistresses I have never met. When I hear that I am a sodomist and a zoophalist then I shall know that I have reached the high point of fame, but I suppose I can hardly expect such exaltation for many years.”
― John Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

“Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty.
Before the year is over, I think I will be looking back longingly on the Gulf of Lower California — that sea of mirages and timelessness. It is a very magical place.

It is cold and clear here now - the leaves all fallen from the trees and only the frogs are very happy. Great cheering sections of frogs singing all the time. The earth is moist and water is seeping out of the ground everywhere. So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded.
Maybe you can find some vague theology that will give you hope. Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like.

There it is — It is interesting to watch the German efficiency, which, from the logic of the machine is efficient but which (I suspect) from the mechanics of the human species is suicidal. Certainly man thrives best (or has at least) in a state of semi-anarchy. Then he has been strong, inventive, reliant, moving. But cage him with rules, feed him and make him healthy and I think he will die as surely as a caged wolf dies. I should not be surprised to see a cared for, thought for, planned for nation disintegrate, while a ragged, hungry, lustful nation survived. Surely no great all-encompassing plan has ever succeeded. And so I'll look to see this German plan collapse because they do not know enough to plan for everything.”
― John Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

“Now as always—humility and terror. Fear that the working of my pen cannot capture the grinding of my brain. It is so easy to understand why the ancients prayed for the help of a Muse. And the Muse came and stood beside them, and we, heaven help us, do not believe in Muses. We have nothing to fall back on but our craftsmanship and it, as modern literature attests, is inadequate. May I be honest; may I be decent; may I be unaffected by the technique of hucksters. If invocation is required, let this be my invocation—may I be strong and yet gentle, tender and yet wise, wise and yet tolerant. May I for a little while, only for a little while, see with the inflamed eyes of a God.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“Man hates something in himself. He has been able to defeat every natural obstacle but himself he cannot win over unless he kills every individual. And this self-hate which goes so closely in hand with self-love is what I wrote about. - in a letter to George Albee”
― John Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

“Only mediocrity escapes criticism.”
― John Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”
― John Steinbeck , Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

“It is snowing again. Confound it, will the winter never be over? I crave to have the solid ground under my feet. You cannot understand that craving if you have never lived in a country where every step was unstable. It is very tiresome and tiring to walk and have the ground give way under you at every step.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“I try to write what seems to me true. If it isn’t true for other people, then it isn’t good art. But I’ve only my own eyes to see with. I won’t use the eyes of other people.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“A great and a brave man belongs to all of us because he activates the little greatness and bravery that sleeps in us. And unfortunately an evil man finds his signals in us also.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“The 15th century and our own have so much in common—Loss of authority, loss of gods, loss of heroes, and loss of lovely pride. When such a hopeless muddled need occurs, it does seem to me that the hungry hearts of men distill their best and truest essence, and that essence becomes a man, and that man a hero so that all men can be reassured that such things are possible. The fact that all of these words—hero, myth, pride, even victory, have been muddied and sicklied by the confusion and pessimism of the times only describes the times. The words and the concepts are permanent, only they must be brought out and verified by the Hero. And this thesis is demonstrable over the ages—Buddha, Jove, Jesus, Apollo, Baldur, Arthur—these were men one time who answered a call and so became the sprits’ls of direction and hope. There was and is an Arthur as surely as there was and is a need for him. And meanwhile, all the legends say, he sleeps—waiting for the call.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“It may be the tearing desire to prove that we have been here at all. Such is our uncertainty that we have been.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary, said, on being warned that he would be assassinated—“Then that’s the way it must be and perhaps better, for some men find their real and permanent strength there. I think,” he continued, “of Benito Juarez, of Abraham Lincoln, of Jesus Christ. Death only kills little men.” And he was illiterate.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“I thank you for inviting me to your inauguration. I was profoundly moved by this ceremony which I had never seen before and even more moved by your following speech which was not only nobly conceived and excellently written and delivered, but also had that magic undertone of truth which cannot be simulated.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“To Lawrence Hagy AN OLD FRIEND IN AMARILLO, TEXAS”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“The first act of a dictator is to close the borders to travel, goods and ideas.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn’t telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“For instance”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“In a way I love the gypsies. They are so uncompromisingly dishonest. Never for a moment do they fall into probity.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“A house is very dead without a dog.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“Unless we can preserve and foster the principle of the preciousness of the individual mind”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“The getting to work is a purely mechanical thing as you well know—a conscious and self-imposed schoolroom. After that”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“So we go into this happy new year”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“The Long Valley.]”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“The phalanx has its own memory—memory of the great tides when the moon was close”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“It is quite easy for the group”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“May I be honest; may I be decent; may I be unaffected by the technique of hucksters. If invocation is required”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“Katherine Fullerton Gerould,”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“You know pretty well that I don’t think of myself as an individual who wants very much. That is why I am not a good nor consecutive seducer. I have the energy and when I think of it, the desires, but I can’t reduce myself to a unit from which the necessary formula emanates.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“Isn’t it funny, my two pet horrors, incapacity and ledgers and they both hit at once. I write columns of figures in big ledgers and after about three hours of it I am so stupefied that I can’t get down to my own work. I can see very readily how office workers get the way they are. There is something soddenly hypnotic about the columns of figures.”
― John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters